Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Browsers

adactio.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 316 posts

Re: Browsers

#251

Post by wvenable »

austincheney wrote: post #247
wvenable wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a matter of opinion, content-box is much more difficult to work with when using fluid layouts than border-box which is why all major CSS frameworks use border-box now. At the time, the CSS specification didn't make it clear which way to calculate widths so Microsoft, probably due to their experience building graphical layout software, chose border-box while all other rendering engines at the time went conten…

You claim it’s not a matter of opinion and due to personal opinion. Weird. Then you invent a history from which to draw imaginary conclusions. It is perfectly ok to have a personal opinion on CSS. You don’t have to justify it and you certainly don’t have to conjure a dillisional alternate reality. Imagination aside, IE3 was the first browser to offer any CSS support.

https://css-tricks.com/box-sizing/

https://blog.teamtreehouse.com/box-sizing-secret-simple-css-...

https://quirksmode.org/css/user-interface/boxsizing.html

https://www.jefftk.com/p/the-revenge-of-the-ie-box-model

https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/issues/12351

https://jgthms.com/minireset.css/

https://github.com/sindresorhus/modern-normalize

https://semantic-ui.com/globals/reset.html

Re: Browsers

#252

Post by hannasanarion »

berbec wrote: post #110
AaronFriel wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counter-point, I've had to set up Chrome with ad blockers even for computer illiterate family members and friends because they eventually have it installed anyway. Why? Not because they knew they were installing it, but because every time you visit "google.com" in Edge, you get an intrusive message that says: "Switch to Chrome Hide annoying ads and protect against malware on the web [No Thanks] [Yes]" And that t…

You'd think there'd be a super-slim version of uBlock that only blocked Google's nag messages to install chrome

Doesn't it already? I've never noticed the nags when using Firefox

Re: Browsers

#253

Post by gruez »

StudentStuff wrote: post #249
ksec wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry I got mixed up, but it should be free for anyone which has H.264 hardware decode. Which is like 95%+ of All PC / Tablet / Smartphone sold in the last 5+ years. And that article from Mozilla, I remember it, worst article from Mozilla for as long as I remember ( That is since Netscape Era ).

Rejecting VP8/VP9 due to Google's involvement is silly and pointless, they're free to use codecs that are much more efficient than H.264. Apple has made its choice to push H.264 & H.265 due to their vested interest in the licensing revenue they stand to gain via the MPEG LA.

Apple has made its choice to push H.264 & H.265 due to their vested interest in the licensing revenue they stand to gain via the MPEG LA.

If that’s true, why are they a member of the AOM, which promotes the royalty free av1?

Re: Browsers

#254

Post by pritambaral »

rictic wrote: post #213
pritambaral wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Currently, all of Google's services work on non-Chrome browsers. Google Earth is Chrome-only, because they use the Chrome-only NativeClient. Google Hangouts dropped calling support on non-Chrome browsers for quite a while: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15889018 YouTube (and perhaps GMail) is extra slow on non-Chrome browsers because they use a dropped-and-never-standardised feature that is available only on…

> YouTube (and perhaps GMail) is extra slow on non-Chrome browsers because they use a dropped-and-never-standardised feature that is available only on Chrome, and force a slow polyfill on Firefox (and perhaps Edge): https://twitter.com/cpeterso/status/1021626510296285185 I work on the Polymer team at Google, and have worked with YouTube on this. I can promise you that the folks at YouTube are working very hard on por…

> I can promise you that the folks at YouTube are working very hard on porting to the specs that are supported crossbrowser.

I'm sure the folks at YouTube are working very hard on porting to the Web standard, but the truth of the matter is:

1. Non-Polymer YouTube works just fine, and yet isn't served on Firefox and Edge;

2. Chrome shipped and continues to support a Chrome-only "standard", which is never going to be a Web standard, for some reason;

3. YouTube, a sibling product of Chrome, and supposedly a Web app, built a whole redesign around this when it wasn't even a Web standard, or even available in more than one browser, and now apparently can't do without, without dragging every browser that YouTube is not related to down.

On these counts, the apparent favouritism is clear.

> there were just some changes between v0 and v1 that are hard to paper over

I believe you. I also see that there's a polyfill for this. And yet, YouTube doesn't (need to) use it in the one browser that it's parent company makes?

> My understanding is that if it weren't for spectre, cross-browser Google Earth would very likely be shipping today. There is a web assembly version of Earth, but it needs threads and SharedArrayBuffer, which is disabled in most browsers today because of spectre-class security issues.

You mean, if it weren't for Spectre, a Web version of Google Earth would very likely be shipping today, using WebAssembly. Google Earth is currently available for the desktop in these forms: A native version, and a Chrome app. Yes, Chrome also happens to be a browser, but it is not just a browser, and Google Earth does (heavily) depend on its non-browser parts.

So, naturally, questions arise:

1. If it weren't for things like Google Earth and Hangouts, would Chrome's NativeClient still be around?

2. If it weren't for Chrome's NativeClient, could Google Earth and Hangouts have become the products that they have?

The answer to the second is easy: Hangouts did exist as an NPAPI plugin for a while, and does currently work on non-Chrome browsers via WebRTC, so it certainly could have used the exact same features on Chrome, and Google Earth has always had an installable, native, desktop version.

Re: Browsers

#255

Post by enusan »

ksec wrote: post #192
XCabbage wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The behaviour that your co-workers claim Google engaged in sounds pretty exactly like the AMD-Intel antitrust case where AMD alleged that Intel's C compiler was deliberately crippling performance on AMD processors to help Intel's processors compete. If true, Microsoft should sue Google over it - not just out of raw corporate self-interest, but because this sort of conduct is evil and should be stamped out. If this ca…

What will Microsoft gain if they Win? Nothing. Google has the upper hand in public image. Microsoft is still evil outside of Dev Circles. And IE did some ass moves as well in IE6 era, think about the PR mess this would lead. It is not the best time to strike now, once the timing is right, I am sure they will.

Agree.

What Microsoft gain after Windows Phone YouTube app case? Nothing. Google successfully fucked up Microsoft.

Re: Browsers

#256

Post by seba_dos1 »

magicalist wrote: post #244
pcwalton wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many sites put invisible DOM elements over the videos? Remember, if you put visible DOM elements on top of the videos, then you lose scanout compositing no matter what.

> How many sites put invisible DOM elements over the videos? A lot of them? Vimeo, for instance, has a number of opacity: 0 and hidden divs over the video. Twitch has at least a couple of opacity: 0 divs on top. Maybe we're interpreting the phrase > hidden empty div over YouTube videos differently? That's the structure I assume they were talking about.

I'd assume that it was actually an invisible, but not technically hidden div, leading to a fully transparent blending pass - divs with opacity:0 or display:none are trivial to optimize for this case.

Re: Browsers

#257

Post by centurion666 »

JoshuaJB wrote: post #124
sonnyblarney wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The concern is not 'now' it's 'later'. Google is a business like any other - and when they have the power to lever a monopolized situation - they will. For example, they may start integrating technologies for which they have exclusive, or at least 'special' access. Can you imagine if all of a sudden Google apps start performing better than anyone else's? Or what if they integrate technology that de-facto collects usa…

"For example, they may start integrating technologies for which they have exclusive, or at least 'special' access. Can you imagine if all of a sudden Google apps start performing better than anyone else's?" This is already happening. I very recently worked on the Edge team, and one of the reasons we decided to end EdgeHTML was because Google kept making changes to its sites that broke other browsers, and we couldn't…

These assumptions truly seem as a random conspiracy theory an intern would write who does not have any idea of how a big company of this sort actually works.

Google of today is a collection of disjointed silos which don't work well together or they work together at all. The leadership of those silos is being aggressively staffed by "industry veterans" VPs and SVPs from Oracle, HP, Motorola and alikes. These folks build their little empires, not products. NIH spreads, internal "competition" starts, etc. This story should sound familiar to more experienced people from Microsoft... they've seen this development phase, they know what I am talking about... Microsoft's name for that was "IBM", Google simply calls that "Microsoft". And when you hear "We are not THAT yet" and people have need to say it, you probably turned into THAT.

Anyway, The idea of Chrome being so aligned with Youtube - over such minor gains over Edge - would today be just a wishful thinking. Until some major, major restructuring and changes to their recent corp "culture", Google will simply remain incapable of driving waaaaay more important product development changes across its product surfaces than this.

Re: Browsers

#258

Post by eridius »

StudentStuff wrote: post #222
eridius wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it's true that Safari only supports H.264, Google already produces quite a lot of H.264 video. In fact, Google has a Google Meet iOS app; I don't suppose you have any idea if they push H.264 to that app, or if they've actually embedded a software VP8/9 encoder/decoder into the app? I sincerely hope it's the former for battery life reasons if nothing else (though we already know Google doesn't seem to care about…

WebRTC was created to replace the need for apps that handle calling, without web push notifications (like every other WebRTC supporting browser has) there is no way for inbound calls to cause the phone to receive a notification unless Safari is open and has the webpage pulled up. WRT VP8/VP9, bandwidth is much more of a concern than you make it out to be. Network bandwidth on mobile devices is inconsistent, unstable,…

Google Meet is a video conferencing app, not a telephone replacement. AFAIK there's no way to "call" someone. So Web Push seems to be rather irrelevant.

> Network bandwidth on mobile devices is inconsistent, unstable, and often relatively low

I'm not using Google Meet on a cellular network. I'm using it on a wifi network. And if it comes to it, I'd rather have slightly worse video quality with H.264 than slightly better video quality with VP8/9 if it means it preserves my battery life (which is to say, set a network bandwidth target and then use whatever video quality meets that target).

> By restricting video to H.264, your stuck with a legacy codec that has relatively poor compression rates compared to the other standardized codecs.

It's apparently really hard to find an actual practical comparison of compression quality of H.264 vs VP8. What info I did find is about 8 years old now and itself was pretty wishy-washy. My vague impression of all of this is "lots of people think VP8 has better compression quality, but won't say by how much, while other people think you can get about the same results, but either way VP8 is rarely hardware-accelerated on mobile".

In any case, if you want better than H.264, how about H.265, which macOS and iOS both support? I have no idea if WebRTC allows the endpoints to negotiate alternative codecs, and I'm having difficulty finding the answer to that.

Re: Browsers

#259

Post by [deleted] »

cramforce wrote: post #217
JoshuaJB wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"For example, they may start integrating technologies for which they have exclusive, or at least 'special' access. Can you imagine if all of a sudden Google apps start performing better than anyone else's?" This is already happening. I very recently worked on the Edge team, and one of the reasons we decided to end EdgeHTML was because Google kept making changes to its sites that broke other browsers, and we couldn't…

Counter anecdote: As a Google engineer it always seemed like Edge implemented the sparsest possible version of the web platform to make major Google products work–and literally nothing else. That works to launch the browser, but then basically any product change runs a chance to no longer fall into that sparse subset and break in a browser. If Edge had implemented a more robust set of features, it would have massivel…

[deleted]

Re: Browsers

#260

Post by executesorder66 »

hannasanarion wrote: post #252
berbec wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd think there'd be a super-slim version of uBlock that only blocked Google's nag messages to install chrome

Doesn't it already? I've never noticed the nags when using Firefox

I use Firefox with the vanilla uBlockOrigin. I don't notice any google nagging except on the google translate page.
Post reply on HN